• Digital Humanities and Cultural Heritage
• Publicationsclose
• 2018-2022close
• Open Access close
• Article close
• SE close
• Publikationer från KTH close

This article discusses David Lowenthal's last book, Quest for the Unity of Knowledge, which was published posthumously by Routledge in 2019 (available in print from November 2018). The book is based on a series of lectures that he gave while a visiting fellow with the KTH Royal Institute of Technology’s Environmental Humanities Laboratory in Stockholm in 2012. Aimed at a general academic audience, it is an erudite and passionate overview showing how ingrained bias towards unity or diversity shapes major issues in education, religion, genetics, race relations, heritage governance, and environmental policy. Quest for the Unity of Knowledge explores the Two Cultures debate, initiated by C.P. Snow, concerning the gulf between the sciences and the humanities. It covers areas such as conservation, ecology, history of ideas, museology, landscape, and heritage studies, aligning with Lowenthal's career-long research interests, and serving as well as a meta-comment to the emerging Environmental Humanities. QC 20220412

The agricultural sector is the main contributor for the warming from non-CO2 gases, especially methane and nitrous oxide. Existing measures to mitigate these emissions can only reduce but not eliminate these emissions. Owing to the diffused nature of these emissions, it is hard to design a single point measure to address the emissions from the agricultural sector. In our work, we present the first-of-a-kind direct air capture-based process to mitigate these diverse emissions. The process is designed based on thermal catalytic route for the methane conversion, which is coupled to a direct air capture unit for CO2 capture. The process was modelled based on steady state assumptions to estimate the energy requirement per tonne of CO2 equivalent mitigated. Energy estimations were later compared for the two methane removal systems with and without CO2 capture unit. The energy demand per tonne CO2-equivalent removed from the system without CO2 capture unit (only CH4 removal) was found to be 16.54 GJ. For the methane removal system with CO2 capture unit (co-removal of CO2 and CH4), the energy demand is 15.42 GJ per tonne-CO2 equivalent. QC 20230120

QC 20220317

QC 20220318

QC 20221201

Biopolitical preparedness: The impact of the behavioralscience research of the Swedish National Defense ResearchEstablishment (FOA) on Swedish crisis preparedness During the post-war period, major research investments were made to improvemilitary and defense capabilities both in Sweden and abroad. Muchremains undone as to exploring the impact of the Swedish National DefenseResearch Establishment (FOA) on Swedish state and society. Historians haveprimarily explored the development and impact of technological and naturalscience research and its connections with e.g. the military industry. Thisarticle provides new insights into the societal and political significance ofSwedish defense research by studying the human sciences at FOA. At thesame time, new insights are gained on the knowledge provision in Swedishpreparedness efforts. The aim of the article is to provide new knowledgeabout the influence of Swedish defense research on the Swedish civil defenseand crisis preparedness in the late 20th century. The purpose of the article isto explore the significance of behavioral science research at the Departmentof Human Sciences (FOA 5) in relation to a process at the end of the ColdWar in which crisis and preparedness were framed as problems pertainingto population behavior and risk awareness. The analysis is inspired bythe theory and research on biopolitics, originating in the works of MichelFoucault. I examine the influence of FOA’s behavioral science research inrelation to what I call “biopolitical preparedness,” which refers to an assemblageof research or knowledge about human life, health and behavior, andpolitical governance. Empirically, the article explores Swedish governmentalcommissions (statens offentliga utredningar) and FOA reports. QC 20220316 Humanities Knowledge in Swedish Defense Research: Human Sciences at FOA 5

What does an anthropologist’s archive look like? Where is it located? And is the anthropology of archives important for the understanding of anthropological thinking today? Here we answer these questions by analysing the various life histories of the archival fragments of one of the most puzzling and influential anthropologists in the history of Russian and Soviet anthropology: Sergei Mikhailovich Shirokogoroff (1887–1939). Shirokogoroff is credited as being one of the authors of the etnos theory — one of the main instruments of identity politics in Russia, China, Germany and also, in part, Japan and South Africa. The transnational life histories of Shirokogoroff and his wife Elizaveta [Elizabeth] Nikolaevna (1884–1943), and of their ideas, suggests a conception of the archive not as a single whole, but instead as a collection of forgotten, hidden, obliterated, or, on the other hand, scrupulously preserved fragments. These fragments are not centred in one place or organized around any one reading, but they nevertheless represent “partial connections”. Moreover, as we can see today with hindsight, none of these archival fragments lay inert. They have been intertwined in local political and social ontologies. Our text has an autoethnograpic quality. While illustrating separate episodes from the life of the Shirokogoroffs we also will tell of our search for the manuscripts through which we were forced onto strange paths and encounters. These greatly deepened our understanding both of the life of documents and their material links to the lives of researchers. Our article is an attempt to illustrate this complex picture which, in the end, will allow us to conclude that we have only just begun to understand the workings of the anthropologist’s archive in the history of anthropological thought. QC 20220530

Can walking trails be understood not only as routes to history and heritage, but also as heritage in and of themselves? The paper explores the articulation of trails as a distinct landscape and mobility heritage, bridging the nature-culture divide and building on physical and intellectual movements over time. The authors aim to contribute to a better understanding of the geography of trails and trailscapes by analysing the emergence of the Swedish-Norwegian trail Finnskogleden. The trail is situated in the border region spanning the former county of Hedmark in present-day Innlandet County, south-eastern Norway, and Värmland County in mid-western Sweden, a forested area where Finnish-speaking immigrants settled from the 16th century to the early 20th century. Archives, literature, interviews, and field visits were used to analyse the emergence and governance of the trail. The main finding is the importance of continuous articulation work by local and regional stakeholders, through texts, maps, maintenance, and mobility. In conclusion, the Finn forest trailscape and its mobility heritage can be seen as an articulation of territory over time, a multilayered process drawing on various environing technologies, making the trail a transformative part of a trans-border political geography. Rörelsearvet: stigar och leder i hållbar och inkluderande kulturarvsförvaltning

We present an online API to access a number of Natural Language Processing services developed at KTH. The services work on Swedish text. They include tokenization, part-of-speech tagging, shallow parsing, compound word analysis, word inflection, lemmatization, spelling error detection and correction, grammar checking, and more. The services can be accessed in several ways, including a RESTful interface, direct socket communication, and premade Web forms. The services are open to anyone. The source code is also freely available making it possible to set up another server or run the tools locally. We have also evaluated the performance of several of the services and compared them to other available systems. Both the precision and the recall for the Granska grammar checker are higher than for both Microsoft Word and Google Docs. The evaluation also shows that the recall is greatly improved when combining all the grammar checking services in the API, compared to any one method, and combining services is made easy by the API. QC 20230328

Advanced NLP models require huge amounts of data from various domains to produce high-quality representations. It is useful then for a few large public and private organizations to join their corpora during training. However, factors such as legislation and user emphasis on data privacy may prevent centralized orchestration and data sharing among these organizations. Therefore, for this specific scenario, we investigate how gossip learning, a massively-parallel, data-private, decentralized protocol, compares to a shared-dataset solution. We find that the application of Word2Vec in a gossip learning framework is viable. Without any tuning, the results are comparable to a traditional centralized setting, with a reduction in ground-truth similarity scores as low as 4.3%. Furthermore, the results are up to 54.8% better than independent local training. QC 20210423